The Trojan Walrus

by Julian Blatchley

  Exiled from Britain by a misjudgement and a misfortune (the misjudgement was that a paint-job would disguise the fact that the car had been created by welding together the opposite ends of two wrecks; the misfortune was selling it to the wife of the Assistant Chief Constable) he had more or less settled in Greece, and Spiros periodically employed him as a mechanic. To call Shergar a mechanic, however, is a bit like calling Ghengis Khan a traveller... it doesn’t quite give the whole picture. He was actually a barmy genius, a mad professor, an improviser, an optimist, and a lateral thinker of startling originality.

  Whenever Shergar succeeded in something, he was disarmingly modest; when he failed, (and his penchant for innovation ensured that he often did, spectacularly) he roared with laughter and took the mickey out of himself at full volume before hatching a new scheme and diving headlong back into the fray.

  Both in looks and nature he resembled a youthful Einstein, and he was equally at home with a ship’s diesel engine or a go-kart buzz box. Despite having left school (to the mutual satisfaction of all concerned) at the age of fourteen, his powers of self-education and a practical, analytical mind meant that what he didn’t know he could reason out with instinctive and crystal-clear logic.

  He loved films, eagerly watching anything from shoot-’em-ups to Shakespeare, he listened religiously to the most avant-garde music available, and his idea of formal dress was a T-shirt with no swear-words on it. Frequently covered in oil, perennially late and capable of assimilating beer like a blue whale ingesting krill, he was nevertheless one of the completest ladies-men I ever knew. I loved being around his girlfriends who were, without exception, vibrant, bonny and as mad as him. Wonderful people to know.

  So why, you are asking, is Shergar not racing Mother Theresa to sainthood? Well, in a nut shell, reliability. He was about as dependable as a politician’s promise. Once he was on a job, he was generally OK as long as no-one opened a cold beer within earshot. Once you lost sight of him, however, then re-locating him was like finding your virginity again... he was in demand for cars, motorbikes, go-karts, women and parties; each and every one of which appealed to him a hell of a lot more than anything that floated. He had a tiny ‘gorilla-bike’ with a souped-up engine on which he commuted enormous distances to race meetings, parties, car-auctions and assignations at insane speeds, a tool-box on the back, his buttocks nine inches off the ground and his knees next to his ears. You could barely see the miniscule motorbike at all, and horrified Greek drivers flinched from the spectacle of a man passing them at high velocity looking like a squatting frog travelling on the bones of its arse. One never knew where he would be or when… he rarely did himself. As hard to find, in fact as... Shergar!

  From the flotilla’s point of view, there was one other slight flaw in Shergar’s character too… he couldn’t drive a boat to save his life. Thus the general bemusedness which accompanied Spiros’s nomination of him as the master before God of Molto Allegro. I suppose there was some sense in it: true, he couldn’t sail... but then, neither could the boat!

  * * *

  In the general mirth and incredulity which greeted this appointment, I happily noted some very positive Greek characteristics... they really can be lovely people. The first instinct of everyone was to shout ‘Bravo!’ and clap Shergar on the shoulder… and even though Greeks have an instinctive fondness for improvisation, this was a very generous reaction, when you consider the circumstances.

  These were people whose livelihood was yachting, and there was an enormous amount of know-how around that table. O Geros and Megali alone must have had close to a hundred years’ experience between them, Xanthos had been skippering since before he left school; Karrottos had started with his father at the age of ten, and although I didn’t yet know anything about Yeorgaki he showed every indication of being a veteran.

  Shergar, by comparison, hardly knew a main sail from a closing-down sale; he could not be anything but an embuggerance on the flotilla and, if he learned, he would only become a potential competitor. To boot, he was a foreigner. There aren’t many places in the world that would have given him anything more than a luke-warm nod in the circumstances, but within seconds a jovial crew was beating him on the back and making jokes about Molto Allegro, about lady archaeologists, and, of course, starting to give him advice. And there is nothing, simply nothing, anywhere under the sun or moon, which Greeks enjoy more than giving advice.

  Greeks give advice as copiously as the Amazon gives to the Atlantic, and as eagerly as gravity getting to work on an unsupported anvil. There is a confidence and generosity about the entire nation that manifests itself in rhetorical counsel on absolutely any subject, in any forum, and under any circumstance. Put a Greek in front of a firing-squad, and he’ll die reminding you to take the safety-catch off. I had come to think of the host nation, in this respect, as terror-didactyls, and now Shergar rolled his eyes and grinned as the concentrated and conflicting essence of decades of Aegean sailing experience broke and eddied around him like Napoleon’s cavalry around Wellington’s squares.

  * * *

  I suppose that everyone considered Shergar’s appointment as the non-sequiteur of the evening, but Spiros had one last little surprise for us... specifically for me, and The Pretty Panzer.

  The Pretty Panzer was a very charmingly rounded young east German lady, of opulent form and a cherubic, mischievously lovely face whom I might perhaps best describe as ‘abundantly beautiful.’ Chubby and dimpled, she glowed with apple-cheeked colour. As tall as the average man and as demure as Foghorn Leghorn, she was a blue-eyed, flaxen Saxon, square in the shoulder, generous in the hips, voluptuous in the belly, buxom, plump, a synergy of curves and flawless flesh that simply exploded with robust health and vigour. She shone with youth and enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm which glowed most radiantly was the one for a western European passport and a father for her children. These were still Iron Curtain days, and The Pretty Panzer, predominantly interested in putting all that socialist workers paradise nonsense firmly behind her, was unashamedly using her every advantage and wile in search of a husband of impeccable national and financial stock.

  She was utterly guileless about her intentions and set out her stall with no inhibitions whatsoever… she wore clothes which had probably fitted her when she was twelve and sunbathed naked at the least excuse, she danced like a dervish, dined like a combine harvester, and wooed like a tsunami. She kept herself surprisingly fit for such a Rubinesque form, running daily in a skin-tight stretch outfit.

  The Greeks were besotted with her, and she trailed a string of Honda Fifties as she destruction-tested her Lycra every morning, but she held fast to her goal of a mate of impeccable financial integrity; not many of whom were to be found lying around unmarried on the island. Shergar swore it as gospel-truth that she kept an engagement ring in her bag in case she should meet Mr Right while out of doors.

  This latter information Shergar had offered to me with an enormous grin, as the arrival of a British ship’s officer on the island represented a veritable sturgeon in the very small pond of the Poros males whom The Pretty Panzer considered to be eligible bachelors. She had thus been exceedingly obliging to me, from the moment that Shergar had introduced her in a blatant effort to get her off his own front porch.

  “He’s the sort of chap you want, PeePee. Really rich... he’s even got a credit card!7”

  ‘PeePee’, as she was content to be known, took my initial rebuff as a mere negotiating ploy and stayed as close as she could. She got very chummy with Kyria Fotini, so that she was often around the house, and constantly asked me for English lessons “becauze I vood zoooooo much like to lif in Inglant, alvays it vos my tream to see ze Bockingkham House.”

  Next, she found out that I like to cook.

  “Oh, pliss to teach me zis cooking... I vant to make sooch vonderful sings for my hosbant. A voman should be able to please her hosbant in every vay, nichtwar?”

  The draft caused by her eyelids made the candles gutter
on the other side of the road.

  When sober, PeePee was an unrelenting suitor; when drunk… an activity in which she engaged with the noisy, salivating abandon of a pig in an apple-store… she was a matrimonial carnivore, a maternal time-bomb, and at absolutely any time she could have eaten and drunk John Paul Getty out of house and home. She really was a very nice person… good hearted and full of joy, but she had an agenda, and her aura was so forceful that you could enjoy it just as well in the next street.

  Even in the condition of celibacy enforced by the Poros winter season I made very sure that I was never alone with PeePee, and was careful not to get inebriated in her company. And these were now resolutions which were going to be a sight harder to keep, for Spiros announced that she would be accompanying the flotilla as hostess, and would be sailing with me in Iraklis. My knees turned to jelly at the prospect.

  These, then, were the Dramatis Personae and Dramatis Naviae which made up the Grave-Robber Flotilla that set sail from Poros in March 1985.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DOWN TO THE SEA AGAIN

  The making of a captain... complacence... heads you lose... down to the sea... the marring of a captain... Iraklis finds a chief mate... Hydra... waiters, another digression... the misrepresentation of Shergar... dinner under the plane-tree... a musical soirée... I am content.

  The first consideration was to teach Shergar to park a boat, and with only one afternoon to accomplish that feat I set about it in the most basic and brutal way. He already knew the boat technically, because Spiros had a management agreement with the English owners, and Shergar had been given a few weeks work to dry-dock and paint her, give the engine a complete service and sort out the ‘to do’ list which charter boats accumulate; and sailing was not critical, because the boat couldn’t. I just needed to teach him how not to crash it in harbours.

  Firstly, I separated him from the rest of the team… it was bad enough that he was getting my lousy advice without it being contradicted by other lousy advice. Then we leapt aboard Molto Allegro and headed round to the North Quay where, over the course of the afternoon, I battered a few nautical basics into Shergar’s eminently terrestrial grey matter.

  Going forward and backward he soon picked up... Molto had a steering wheel, and this was not too strange to him; he loved carving the still water in a turn and since steering a boat astern requires it to have a bit of speed, that appealed to his racy nature too. In very short order, our new Columbus was confidently turning and reversing in the open, obstacle-free water in front of the ageing destroyer at the naval base.

  Next I tried to enforce upon him the most unnatural art of moving very, very slowly… the staple safeguard of the inexperienced boater, but which Shergar was genetically incapable of conceptualising. It was as if he had been mauled by an accelerator in infancy, so that he now had a visceral aversion to throttles of any sort and, wherever he saw one, he simply had to push it as far away from him as possible. Otherwise what was the point of the confounded thing? Decelerating was something Shergar only did with flashing lights in his rear-view mirror, and even then only when there was no narrow side-road close ahead, so the compromise we reached on the issue of slow speed was of United Nations-scale uselessness. Giving that up as a bad job, I progressed to parking.

  The Mediterranean moor (by which I mean the recognised way of parking a boat between Gibraltar and Suez, and not the sultry chap you wouldn’t want your daughter to marry) requires the anchor to be let go some way from the quay. The boat is then reversed towards the land, paying out chain as she goes; ideally she will then be stopped just as she reaches the quay and some sprightly crew-member or a helpful passerby ties the stern end to whatever can be found ashore… bollards, trees, discarded boat engines, taverna pergolas, fishermen… and finally the anchor chain is tensioned to leave the yacht securely held between anchor and shore, comfortably clear of the dock. All very simple with an empty quay on a calm day, but empty quays are rare in Greece and they coincide with calm days about as often as pigs are given clearance for take-off at Heathrow. To cope with the usual crowded waterfront in a cross-wind requires a degree of coordination which is not often instilled in a complete greenhorn in a single afternoon; so I showed Shergar the basics and then taught him ‘the fall-back plan’... an inelegant but effective remedy which involves anchoring clear of the quay, rowing ashore with a long rope in a dinghy, and then pulling one’s argosy in with the winches. Shergar, having not the least sensitivity with regard to his nautical prowess, was perfectly content with this.

  By sunset, we were smugly pleased with our progress, but aching from the experience... Shergar and I shared a sense of humour and a taste for the ridiculous which made us a dangerous pair. Once we started extracting the absurd in any situation or idea, we simply fed off each other until we both ended up a giggling pile of dysfunctional body-parts in the nearest corner. A whole afternoon together had battered our thoracic musculature (such as it was) like a bout with a heavyweight boxer.

  We completed the training of Shergar by retiring to George’s Cafe, where I swiftly précised the entirety of nautical lore and law into two digestible pieces of advice: The International Regulations for the Prevention of Collisions at Sea1 were abbreviated to ‘keep right,’ and as far as sailing was concerned I was just a little more comprehensive.

  “Keep an eye on me. If I put a sail up, you put the same sail up the same amount. No less, and definitely no more. If I let it out, let yours out. If I pull mine in, you do the same. To trim sails, get the boat on course. Then let the sails out until they flap, and then pull them in until it just stops.”

  He looked at me quizzically.

  “You’ll do fine!” I assured him, and we both dissolved into a fit of the giggles.

  Spiros turned up at this point, bringing with him a pantingly keen Pretty Panzer who was even more radiantly happy than usual at her inclusion in the Poros yachting scene, and openly carnivorous at the prospect of sailing with me. Alerted by a pout which would have alarmed a grouper, I ducked out of an attempted embrace and ‘accidentally’ obstructed her advance with a chair whilst I looked for an excuse to escape. Spiros! I buttonholed him, and drew him to one side, as though to have a private word. And I couldn’t think of a private word to have, so I said the first thing that came into my head... which, in fact, had been in my head all afternoon.

  “Spiro,” I whispered conspiratorially, “I’ve been thinking. Shergar doesn’t know anything about sailing. He’s bound to cock something up somewhere along the line. Wouldn’t it be better to put some of the kids on his boat? They’ll be partying... they won’t care how he drives. But the lecturers won’t be fooled, and they’re the chaps who organise the whole trip.”

  A look of concerned astonishment came over his face, the sort of look General Custer might have given as he said, “How many?”

  “What? No, no, I can’t do that... no-one else wants to sail with the lecturers!” Spiros looked at me as if I was a complete idiot, and the penny finally noticed the signpost saying ‘down’. Of course not! The skippers all wanted to be near the girls... Spiros couldn’t find anyone to look after a pack of staid, dusty old lecturers without making it worthwhile some other way. I don’t doubt that he had serious misgivings about Shergar captaining the expedition leaders, but not so serious that he was actually prepared to pay someone to do it. Shergar’s time was already being paid for by the Molto’s owners in far away England. Spiros was just going to rely on his silver tongue to mitigate any fallout.

  * * *

  Dawn in Poros. Rising in the last moments of night, I made coffee and took it onto the veranda overlooking the Poros channel to watch the eastern sky turn its coat from union blue to confederate grey. Then the begonia glow of dawn ignited the high ridge above Belesi and the blaze of light gradually flowed down the hillside, filling the east end of the strait. Muted voices and the occasional clink of cup on saucer drifted up from the waterfront below me; the dockside stirred. There was a tinny cl
ash as an aluminium gangway was moved, a few motorbikes rasped and then, with a rumble and a popping of exhausts, the Delfini Express backed off the quay and headed for Piraeus. The growl of her engines faded until the calm of the morning was again broken only by the sawing and coughing of the mules which collect the garbage daily in the narrow lanes at the top of the town.

  I washed my cup, showered, threw the last items into my toilet bag, and closed my grip. Kyria Fotini was already sweeping the avli2 as I descended, and she bade me a very fond kalises anemes, or ‘fair winds’, as I let myself out of the gate. As I walked down through the town, grip over my shoulder and sunglasses taming the already-brilliant light at the end of the harbour, I felt enormous self-satisfaction. Several people greeted me on my way, already recognisable faces although not, as yet, names. The winding little paths, with their impeccable whitewash, were by now familiar and my step was sure. The brilliance of the morning sky, the dazzling chalky walls, the riot of colour which cascaded from every window-box and flower-pot all delighted me. What possible need had I of worn-out tankers and ungrateful employers if I could make a living like this?